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Morning Tide

Butcher’s Broom

The Silver Darlings 1

The Silver Darlings 2

Neil Gunn in conversation
(8Mb mp4 file)

Morning Tide p8

"… the beach sloped in clean grey-blue stones rounded and smooth, some no
bigger than his fist, but some larger than his head. As he stepped on them they
slithered and rolled with a sea noise. The noise rose up and roared upon the
dusk like a wave. All around no life was to be seen, there was no movement
but the sea's."

Butcher’s Broom p426

" The human mother carrying on her ancient solitary business with the earth,
talking good and familiar sense with boulder and flower and rock … "

The Silver Darlings p17

" They had never [before] been so far from land, and the slow movement of the sea
became a living motion under them. It brimmed up against the boat and choked its
own mouth, then moved away; and came again and moved moved away, without
end, slow, heedless, and terrible, its power restrained, like the power in some great
invisible bull."

The Silver Darlings p278

" Sailing along the coast of one's native land was a new way of reading [its] history,
a detached way, so that instead of being embroiled in it, one looked on. [The page,
too, was large.]

Here the castle itself, there the ruin, yonder the parish church, and everywhere the
croft houses. Morven—the sailor's landfall—was as clear in outline as the
[nipple of the] Pap before it. The long, [s]low sweep[s] of [the] land rose and fell; one
saw its [their] beginning and its [their] end, the ultimate horizon line of
[the] moor, the near gully that fell into the sea. "